News Comment/COMENTARI AL DIA

The Decline and Fall of the Light Bulb/DECLIVI I CAIGUDA DE LA BOMBETA

The Decline and Fall of the Light Bulb

by David Leeson

How many Bushes to unscrew a light bulb? A history lesson: Obama is now less trusted and liked than W. Below: NSA unscrews the world: How many Obama supporters to change a light bulb? None, they prefer to remain in the dark.

Decline and Fall has challenged many historians. After Edward Gibbon unscrewed the Roman Empire, David Leeson now unscrews the light bulb:

”There is a great deal of debate on this issue. Up until the mid-20th century, the accepted answer was one: and this Whiggish narrative underpinned a number of works that celebrated electrification and the march of progress in light-bulb changing. Beginning in the 1960s, however, social historians increasingly rejected the Great Man school and produced revisionist narratives that stressed the contributions of research assistants and custodial staff. This new consensus was challenged, in turn, by women’s historians, who criticized the social interpretation for marginalizing women, and who argued that light bulbs are actually changed by department secretaries. Since the 1980s, however, postmodernist scholars have deconstructed what they characterize as a repressive hegemonic discourse of light-bulb changing, with its implicit binary opposition between “light” and “darkness,” and its phallogocentric privileging of the bulb over the socket, which they see as colonialist, sexist, and racist. Finally, a new generation of neo-conservative historians have concluded that the light never needed changing in the first place, and have praised political leaders like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher for bringing back the old bulb. Clearly, much additional research remains to be done.”